Television
Waiting for Beastie
By CLIFFORD HANLEY
I hope I'm wrong, because we could use a good serial, yet this one seems to me to suffer from the dread disease that can kill any suspense thriller: gloom. The hero and his wife have already spent their wedding night glowering at each other, the cranky scientist has shown an ominous passion for declaiming manifestos, the staff at the pub haven't produced a smile among them.
The thriller serial has to be created inside a rigid framework, and that's all the more reason why inside the framework it must suggest a credible, interesting society. If all the characters are working full-time at being frightened or villainous, they wear the viewer out. Quatermass, for instance, always had Professor Quatermass, though Andre Morell in playing the role pos- sibly gave it more roundness than there was in the script. In any case, the Professor and his chums always seemed real. Nigel Kncale, the Quatermass writer, also had two extremely rare talents: a prodigious inventiveness and a highly developed view of the human situation. And he didn't stretch a story out to fill several instal- ments. He crammed more into each thirty minutes than you get in most full-length TV plays. Recent serials have tended to spread the material thin, and it doesn't work.
After all this nagging, I think The Monsters has a nice lot of ingredients. I hope they're going to come to the boil soon, all the same.
For simple audacity, nothing recently has touched the new Bootsie and Snudge series, which played an air disaster for giggles in a Lunatic parody of Flight into Danger. It was a scream. There's something about Bootsie and Snudge that I can't define, some quality that repels me. It's probably something in Bill Fraser's deliberate over-ripe squid approach to his character. But I can't resist it. The pro- gramme keeps giving flashes of something deeper and more terrible than light entertain- ment. It's subversive.
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